We have seen what decades of neglect have led to in areas such as education, health care, infrastructure and energy policy. Cutting back is the last thing that governments around the world can afford to do at this moment in time. Anyone who knows about finance and economic systems will quickly realize that it is the moment of greatest uncertainty that one needs to dig deep and follow time tested and true methods of investing. Let me quickly clip the wings of your association between investing and the stock market, any stock market. Investing as I use the word depends on moral certainty about right and wrong, compassionate and despotic dispensation of our dollars. There is no usury involved when gifting is not rewarded with interest. Investment, like you might have expected someone to talk about is the antithesis of what I believe investment to be about. Case in point, my sister invests through an organization that funnels micro-loans to mostly women in third world nations. She has recouped 100% of her investment on each and every loan, not because they are underwritten by a bank or municipality, state or nation, but by love and trust, true compassion. Her investing proves that if we trust one another, good things occur.
There has been a multi-trillion dollar effort to convince us that somehow the gambling that takes place on Wall Street matters. It does not, unless you are counting on the gambling house to pay out someday. Have you ever seen one that does? Just for one moment consider the difference between a loan that my sister might give a woman in the Sahara, enough for her to start a business and pay for her children's education. This perhaps makes positive changes for something on the order of twenty years, perhaps a lifetime. Now consider the Big Board, where the average share of stock nowadays is held a matter of seconds, traded at light speed by computers. Most of the algorithms that determine what is hot and what is not are based on things like raping the earth and maximizing profitability over the next quarter. This roughly translates to cutting jobs and no longer providing retirement benefits or insurance for workers. Those dollars are fickle and when accepted lead to greedier and evermore deceitful parlay. The sharks are always feeding, taking huge profits from both shell companies and legitimate ones while dodging any sort of regulation or penalty. It is truly sad that the news seems to struggle to bring us that one good story each night, but how the legal gambling house did is automatically and precisely reported without fail.
The anatomy of true investment begins by giving something that is useful to another in need. An unemployed person a job, a hungry person a meal, a road filled with potholes a resurfacing, etc. From the filling of need great economies of scale can be realized and the results of living better broadly distributed across the landscape. Dollars spent close to home tend to stay in the region far longer than if they are spent even ten or twenty miles away. The same can be said for "development", for far too long there has been a systematic divorce between locations that are conducive to living, working and shopping. In addition to addicting our cultures to transportation, it has imposed an insidious tax of time spent, mostly in automobiles, that could be productive. Yesterday's news about the National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, indicates that so many Americans are trying to be "productive" behind the wheel that tens of thousands of us will die at their hands. Talk about terrorists, they could strike anywhere at any time. The bad news, they are more likely to kill innocent Americans than Osama Bin Laden ever was. We have run our population so ragged that many are faced with having to do three jobs and still they need to cut back on essentials, or learn to do without. Energy prices continue to climb, yet we forget to invest in a continuous flow of electrons whenever the sun shines and are barely making tentative steps to secure even more electricity from the wind. The public has never wanted anything quite as badly as a diesel electric car, though the car companies never offered it. Investing in the next big thing should be a no-brainer right?
Not what the sharks are saying. This puts too many dollars out of the current system, too many into goods and not enough into the true shadow economy in which the public gets legally fleeced while they are told it is a "bad economy". The ever-increasing class sizes that our schools have had to deal with alone should tell us that something is wrong. Dumping of problem children and disruptive students into already over-sized classes has led us to disservice millions of young adults and the trends are continuing. We need to stand together around the globe to tell our leaders that we want services that are difficult to provide on our own. We do not want to bail out undeserving corporations no matter how painful it gets and we certainly don't want to cut back on essential work that only a government can do. Our leaders need to stop spending time posturing and trying to get re-elected and instead focus on cutting fraud and abuse, holding stock market thieves accountable for their despotism and reinstating the essential character of the American Dream, helping one another to achieve our full potential. heck, while we're at it, perhaps everyone could get bootstraps. I know that I have not been able to find mine yet.
There has been a multi-trillion dollar effort to convince us that somehow the gambling that takes place on Wall Street matters. It does not, unless you are counting on the gambling house to pay out someday. Have you ever seen one that does? Just for one moment consider the difference between a loan that my sister might give a woman in the Sahara, enough for her to start a business and pay for her children's education. This perhaps makes positive changes for something on the order of twenty years, perhaps a lifetime. Now consider the Big Board, where the average share of stock nowadays is held a matter of seconds, traded at light speed by computers. Most of the algorithms that determine what is hot and what is not are based on things like raping the earth and maximizing profitability over the next quarter. This roughly translates to cutting jobs and no longer providing retirement benefits or insurance for workers. Those dollars are fickle and when accepted lead to greedier and evermore deceitful parlay. The sharks are always feeding, taking huge profits from both shell companies and legitimate ones while dodging any sort of regulation or penalty. It is truly sad that the news seems to struggle to bring us that one good story each night, but how the legal gambling house did is automatically and precisely reported without fail.
The anatomy of true investment begins by giving something that is useful to another in need. An unemployed person a job, a hungry person a meal, a road filled with potholes a resurfacing, etc. From the filling of need great economies of scale can be realized and the results of living better broadly distributed across the landscape. Dollars spent close to home tend to stay in the region far longer than if they are spent even ten or twenty miles away. The same can be said for "development", for far too long there has been a systematic divorce between locations that are conducive to living, working and shopping. In addition to addicting our cultures to transportation, it has imposed an insidious tax of time spent, mostly in automobiles, that could be productive. Yesterday's news about the National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, indicates that so many Americans are trying to be "productive" behind the wheel that tens of thousands of us will die at their hands. Talk about terrorists, they could strike anywhere at any time. The bad news, they are more likely to kill innocent Americans than Osama Bin Laden ever was. We have run our population so ragged that many are faced with having to do three jobs and still they need to cut back on essentials, or learn to do without. Energy prices continue to climb, yet we forget to invest in a continuous flow of electrons whenever the sun shines and are barely making tentative steps to secure even more electricity from the wind. The public has never wanted anything quite as badly as a diesel electric car, though the car companies never offered it. Investing in the next big thing should be a no-brainer right?
Not what the sharks are saying. This puts too many dollars out of the current system, too many into goods and not enough into the true shadow economy in which the public gets legally fleeced while they are told it is a "bad economy". The ever-increasing class sizes that our schools have had to deal with alone should tell us that something is wrong. Dumping of problem children and disruptive students into already over-sized classes has led us to disservice millions of young adults and the trends are continuing. We need to stand together around the globe to tell our leaders that we want services that are difficult to provide on our own. We do not want to bail out undeserving corporations no matter how painful it gets and we certainly don't want to cut back on essential work that only a government can do. Our leaders need to stop spending time posturing and trying to get re-elected and instead focus on cutting fraud and abuse, holding stock market thieves accountable for their despotism and reinstating the essential character of the American Dream, helping one another to achieve our full potential. heck, while we're at it, perhaps everyone could get bootstraps. I know that I have not been able to find mine yet.
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